Mask of Her Reflection in Venus

By L. A. Espriux

Author L. A. Espriux presents to the reader this latest collection of short stories titled Mask of Her Reflection in Venus. These intriguing tales expressed from the point of view of 10 female protagonists, challenges superficial concept of what it means to be born female in a world primarily dominated by h

• Language: English
• Publisher: L. A. Espriux
• Release date: Nov 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986783840

Book preview

Dedicated to my beloved sisters          

 Penny Cody & Cendi Baugus  

Contents

Dedication

Naked

The Tanner

The Dancing Ballerina

Eve of the Quiet Man

Eclipse

Song of Budgies

Cloud Rider

Blind Osiris

Sahra Moon Over Kahnawake

Dream of Beauty

Books By This Author

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                                           Venus Ascending

      Born at equinox

Laced in season and shade

        Immortal

Her eyes her mother’s eyes

 Winter blue

 Reflected ageless

In a glass of deception

Fading into emptiness

The promise of enmity

The cost of desire

  And all the jewels

And all the satins

Bestowed as gifts and pleasures

All becoming empty in her soul

Garment of flesh once made beautiful

 To be and somehow never to be

   Reaching always into illusion

    Lost in depths of many eyes desired

Blood of generations mingled in her soul

Until husk of seasons changed

Harsh and brittle as her memory

Of a reflection beheld in time

Her tears now dry as desert sand

Slipping through skeletal fingers

Clutching distant thoughts of love

As when once the world

  Innocent

    And so very young then  

                         L. A. Espriux              

                                                                                                  

Author' Personal Note to the Reader  

As a male in my mind I live divided and as a female in my mind I live divided.  However, the true equinox of my life comes after serving three years in the United States Marine Corps, returning from Vietnam a decorated Sergeant.  This is when the Holy Spirit intersects my life in a dynamic way and I am born again.  It is because of this experience that I have been provided choice to transcend meaning of male and female, recognizing the true face of both, but becoming subject to neither.  It is also for this same reason I am called to give testament that there is more to being than prescribed by expression of mechanical existence.  And that the true enemy of our souls not made by reason designed through flesh and blood experience.   

As stated in Mathew 22, verses 29 and 30, Jesus spoke these words: Jesus answered and said unto them, You are mistaken, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.  (NKJ)

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Table of Contents

        1  Naked............................................... Page 7

2  The Tanner...................................... Page 15

3   The Dancing Ballerina................... Page 36

4   Eve of the Quiet Man...................... Page 48

5   Eclipse………………………………...  Page 65

6   Song of Budgies............................... Page 96

7   Cloud Riders.................................... Page 110

8   Blind Osiris...................................... Page 124

9   Sahra Moon over Kahnawake……. Page 154

10  Dream of Beauty............................. Page 171

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    Copyright @ 2023 Books by L. A.Espriux

     WWW.ESPRIUX.COM

ISBN

Soft Cover                  979-8-9867838-3-3

eBook                           9798986783840

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be   

reproduced  or   transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic, or storage and retrieval

systems, without permission in writing from

copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,  

places and incidents either are the product of the

author's imagination or used factiously, and an      

resemblance to any actual person, living or dead,

events, or  locals is entirely coincidental.

Mask of Her Reflection in Venus

Rev. Date: 11/10/2023

               Cover Design & Original Artwork

by Cendi Baugus

"So she bites into the fruit

                                 cursed by jealousy

and slumbers in illusion..."

Naked

He came with the wind.  No one knew how long or how far he traveled.  He came naked before a storm, only his bare flesh evidence that he was more than a wilderness animal.  Something made less than anything supernatural.  Susan Hatteras sat alone when he pawed weakly outside her door.  At first she thought it a twig or a small creature scratching at the entrance.  But when the door opened she sees him instead, shivering, whimpering like a fox to be let in from the cold. 

Maybe it was compassion, or a thing like compassion that compels Susan to be braver than her nature.  Perhaps the distance in his blue eyes softens her heart a little too much, as she thinks of the bitter cold in a blizzard that reaches out of the North Pole pawing at the eaves of her little house in the valley.  So on this windy December night, Susan Hatteras allows a stranger from nowhere to enter her home.

He says nothing, demands nothing, but curls beside the fire and sleeps without shame.  So many questions Susan wishes to ask.  Like who is he, or even if he has a name, or what terrible calamity has pursued him naked to her door?  So she asks nothing and only sits down silently in her rocking chair to watch him sleep in nothingness.

It is not the silence of pity.  There is no pity in Susan Hatteras.  She has seen the days of the great famine sweep over the land like locust devouring the living.  And the children --God--the children suffered most!  Children that knew no evil--their lives cut short-- cries from the past nearly forgotten now.  Her own child only three, snatched away by pneumonia, and nothing she could do.  There is no service, no words of comfort, even the earth too hard to break with shovel and pick.  Therefore they must wait through the long winter, with only the howl of wind to console their broken souls, until finally the earth softens enough to dig a grave.  She still sees in her mind the frozen face of death, the shadow of innocence that lingers and lingers inside the storage shed for five long cold months, until her heart also changes to ice.  For a season she wept, and at the end of that season she never weeps again.  Not even one evening three years later when Susan finds Michael slumped broken over his plow.

The land sewed with dragon's teeth in every furrow: the earth always resisting, always defying mortal hand to break it year after year beneath a hot sun.  Never is there enough rain, never a cool place in the shade.  Susan gathers enough strength to bury him alone.  Carves out a hole in the petrified ground and lays him there beside bed of a smaller grave.  Sandpaper wind stings the parchment of her face, dredging water from the dry wells of eyes faded grey.  But Susan Hatteras does not cry.  She has sworn never to cry again, has sworn an oath as harsh as the land, to become as it has made her.  And when the last rock pounded into place, Susan is content that at least the coyotes denied their morsel.  This little comfort, but enough for Susan Hatteras, enough to sustain the years of loneliness, enough to give meaning to austerity of her solitude.  No longer does she expect anything more.

Susan sits in her chair rocking slowly with the same motion as the Grandfather clock ticking solemnly in the corner.  It was given her by a neighbor after Michael died.  It never keeps proper time, but what is the meaning of time to Susan now?  It makes a noise, enough to drown out the silences.  What is time anyway, except glimpse of the living moment crumpled into a finite passage of light and shadow? 

This she reasoned on her own one evening just after sunset while sitting on her porch and watching lightening crackle deafly upon distant horizon.  It appeared such a wondrous phenomenon.  Had the spectacle been even a little briefer, or had she closed her eyes to the caress of an evening breeze, Susan would have missed it altogether.  She remains etched forever in silence, as fire dances across the heavens.  An eternity later thunder approaches, rumbling closer and closer.  This is when Susan realizes the absurdity of time.  Realizes how foolish dreams from the past.  So Susan Hatteras forgets all she has ever known, taking a vow to remember nevermore...before this night.

He sleeps so perfectly still that Susan thinks he might be dead.  Else a statue survived from some ancient world, gaining life only to come to her hearth, and once again change immutable.  He is without flaw as she dreamed someone like him should be flawless.  Susan does not remember the dream or when she dreamed it.  Only just now it becomes vivid in her mind, as a prophecy whispered into fulfillment.  In the bare nakedness of this moment she desires to kiss his exposed shoulder, to know if there is feeling in stone touching stone.  She imagines this only, and continues to rock slowly in her chair, as the ceiling creaks, and the wind howls down the chimney spreading flames in the fireplace.

She thinks of covering his nakedness with a quilt made during the last dynasty of her life...but cannot.  She refuses to cover perfection, refuses to conceal that which has survived beautiful into the harshness of winter.  To see the marble of his body rippled by hands of caressing shadows enough to restore her imagination.  This is all that matters to her now.  Tomorrow she will give him clothes once worn by her husband, but tonight she desires only to see him as he truly is.  This Susan Hatteras does, and nothing more.

Shadows grow darker, an assault to smother the dying flames.  Outside a blizzard has reached into the valley sculpting the land with new dimension, sweeping over the house of Susan Hatteras as magic dust escaped from a wizard's pouch.  Perhaps she has slept and dreamed; or perhaps dreamed without slumber.   But when Susan looks at the place where he sleeps, she sees him sitting up and gazing into her eyes.  Not the glare of animosity, for he knows no animosity or any passion that may be like it.  He has sorcerer's eyes that do not blink.  And he is looking through Susan Hatteras.

She is not afraid.  Fear a clinging for those who love life too little.  She knows what it means to lose, to pay the price of the living.  As a little girl Susan remembers a Manitoba twister that tore across the Canadian South West taking her home with it.  Her father nearly lost too!  He manages to cling to a tree while the wind rips holes in his flesh.  He was a strong man.  They said that what he did impossible.  But he proved them wrong.  He proved what a man can do when his life at stake.  He never was the same after that, as though the twister touched something more fragile inside, something he never wanted to talk about.  It takes many years for the rest of that man to die.

Susan sits in her chair and remains silent.  She watches as his body tightens with each breath, fascinated by the exposed contour of his sleek thighs.  She wants to ask if he is cold or hungry, or if he might like some hot tea.  She even considers putting another log on the fire.  But Susan Hatteras says nothing and does nothing. 

She wishes only the silence between them.  There is truth in silence.  Were he to speak she would know him to be another lie, know that he is like all the others made frail by promises at ceremonies no one understands.  Her own promise forgotten so long ago...and still some part of her hopes still to remember.

It is vanity only that keeps Susan Hatteras transfixed--not his vanity, but her own vanity.  Not her own present vanity, but rather the shell of her spent existence reflected in him.  She knows now the sin, prays for a way to escape the truth.  But there is no escape this time--and she is glad!  She is glad he has come, glad that at last she is free to truly feel and remember nothing.    

Susan Hatteras begins weeping for the first time in so many years.  She weeps for all the beauty missed, only to find it now.  She weeps for the pain suffered by others--and for the living.  But what Susan weeps for most she cannot say, only that it is more wonderful than anything she could have ever hoped would be.

He rises panther-like from his place on the hearth.  He ascends as a fire god with burning gold hair from the spent ashes.  He knows; therefore does not speak.  He does not need the cumbersome wrappings of half truth to cover his shame, because his nakedness is pure and without blemish.  His desire transfixed in the empty space of this moment only.  It cannot be said that he was innocent.  Rather he is innocence.  He sees clearly the weeping woman.  He sees and comprehends completely the naked shame of her soul.  Because he understands, he accepts, as the land accepts the snow without judgment, without resistance to that which must be.

He kneels before Susan Hatteras and kisses her softly on the lips.  It is not passion that drives him.  His purpose compelled by something greater than passion, something that reaches beyond the curse born of flesh and bone.  A thing nameless, but with a name no one can remember.  He kisses her once; and it is enough.  His meaning fulfilled, he ascends a quickening shadow and steps through the open door, departing the way remembered.    

Susan Hatteras says nothing, nor tries to stop him.  She does not warn that a man cannot survive naked in the snow.  The blizzard has stopped now.  The cold no longer matters.  Nothing matters beyond this moment of his visit.  Tomorrow she would ponder the meaning of the man who came naked into her house, as always tomorrow comes.

She thinks of the clock that keeps no time, the earth that bares no harvest, the merciless infinity of a parched sky.  Tomorrow life would begin again for Susan Hatteras as it always begins since so many days and weeks and years.  Tonight something new and extraordinary seared into presence.  She remains truly at peace in her chair, eyes transfixed upon the place where he slept, the last embers dying darkly.

Joseph Moregraves awakens earlier than was his habit.  The world outside transformed white and pure by ravage of a blizzard that smothered the valley overnight.   Skeleton of a Poplar tree droops wearily outside his window encrusted in an icy armor much like a man's life, soon to melt, too soon to seep quietly back into the elements.

Joseph cannot say why he thought of Susan Hatteras.  They had been neighbors for nearly half a century.  He knew her father and her mother, and remembers Susan as a little girl.  But it is only after her husband died that he really got to know Susan.  She was a strong woman, a woman who asked nothing of anyone.  Michael was in the ground for more than a month before anyone knew she was living out there alone.  So Joseph gave her a clock to help keep away the loneliness.  A family heirloom handed down through the generations just for that purpose.  It was slow by a half hour every two or three days.  Joseph had been promising himself for weeks to drop by and make the proper adjustment, but never seemed to get around to it.  This was a good morning for a walk, as good a morning as any to set things right.  After all it is Christmas.  What better day to visit old friends and neighbors.

An hour past sunrise, Joseph begins the mile journey to the home of Susan Hatteras deeper in the valley.  Even bundled in animal skins, he cannot remember a colder day.  This will later be recorded as the worst storm to hit the Manitoba west in over seventy-five years.  Three quarters of a century not considered long in this kind of country, but long enough when they pass in the course of several lifetimes.

There is something not right about the house.  The blizzard has piled a large snow drift on one side that rises above the windows.  But there is something else odd about the scene--something that cannot quite be put into words.  All too quiet, too motionless, as if the house has been sleeping undisturbed for a hundred years waiting for some living soul to discover it.

Inside Joseph finds Susan Hatteras sitting in her chair beside the cold fireplace.  Like the house, she seems always to have been here.  She did not offer Joseph tea, nor jump up and pace the floor nervously looking for something out of place while wringing her hands, or any of the things she normally did when he arrived.  She only stares blankly at a place beside the hearth, the place where he slept through her tears; the amber frozen on pallid cheeks.

No one could say why Susan Hatteras was crying, or how the door came to be open.  Nor could anyone explain the bare foot prints left in the snow tracking away from the house.

Joseph Moregraves follows those prints several hundred yards through crystal halls of wooded passages.  Then it begins snowing again, the trail vanished without a trace.  It